Episodes

The 2024 UN Climate Change Conference (COP29) ended in late November in Baku. Two weeks of intense climate negotiations unveiled deep divides—particularly between the Global North and South over climate finance and contentiou...

Who are those “experts” who sit in Washington DC and come up with policy toward China and Russia? You know, those academics, journalists, and think-tankers who generate the knowledge US officials rely on? David McCourt’s new ...

Nationalists are not born. They are made. But how? That journey is far trickier. Fabian Baumann’s award-winning book, Dynasty Divided: A Family History of Russian and Ukrainian Nationalism , traces how one family in 19th-cent...

In 2020, Russian-American filmmaker Michael Lockshin and his co-writer, Roman Kantor, were offered an impossible task: to adapt Mikhail Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita for the big screen. It was a daunting task to rewrite suc...

Guest: Bryan Gigantino, co-host of the podcast Reimagining Soviet Georgia, on the context and causes for the current political crisis in Georgia.

Guest: Benjamin Nathans on To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement published by Princeton University Press.

Guest: Ian Lanzillotti guides through the history of Kabardino-Balkaria in his book Land, Community, and the State in the Caucasus published by Bloomsbury.

Guest: Erin Hutchinson on her award-winning article, “Gathering the Nation in the Village: Intellectuals and the Cultural Politics of Nationality in the Late Soviet Period” in the January 2023 issue of the Russian Review.

Guest: Maurice Casey on the “lost world” of international communism in his book, Hotel Lux: An Intimate History of Communism’s Forgotten Radicals published by Footnote Press.

Guest: Tyler Kirk on After the Gulag: A History of Memory in Russia's Far North published by Indiana University Press.

Guest: Pavel Khazanov on The Russia That We Have Lost: Pre-Soviet Past as Anti-Soviet Discourse published by the University of Wisconsin Press.

Guest: Ambassador Eric Rubin on the efforts to free Marc Fogel, an American serving 14 years in the Russian prison for possessing 17 g of medical marijuana.

Guests: Marina Mogilner and Ilya Gerasimov on their new textbook, A New Imperial History of Northern Eurasia, 600–1700: From Russian to Global History published by Bloomsbury.

Guest: Andrea Bohlman on the curious history of the sound postcard in People's Republic of Poland.

Guest: Valeria Umanets on women in municipal governance in the Soviet Union and under Putin.

Guest: Daniel Mikecz on Civil Movements in an Illiberal Regime: Political Activism in Hungary published by Central European University Press.

Guest: Matthew Kendall on his article “Room for Noise in Soviet Sound Recording” in the Winter 2023 issue of the Slavic Review.

Guest: Gabrielle Cornish on the sound of Lenin's voice and other sounds of socialism.

Guest: Masha Kirasirova on The Eastern International: Arabs, Central Asians, and Jews in the Soviet Union's Anticolonial Empire published by Oxford University Press.

Guest: Sergey Radchenko on To Run the World: The Kremlin’s Cold War Bid for Global Power published by Cambridge University Press.

Guests: Anna Arutunyan and Mark Galeotti on their new book Downfall: Prigozhin, Putin, and the New Fight for the Future of Russia published by Penguin.

Guest: Kevin Platt on Border Conditions: Russian-Speaking Latvians Between World Orders published by Cornell University Press.

Guest: Lisa Kirschenbaum on Soviet Adventures in the Land of the Capitalists: Ilf and Petrov's American Road Trip published by Cambridge University Press.

Guest: Vassily Klimentov on A Slow Reckoning: The USSR, the Afghan Communists, and Islam published by Cornell University Press.